When I was growing up on the east coast, when we went to the city to see a movie (our city of choice was Baltimore) we went most often to three theaters, the Charles, the Rotunda, and the Senator (the logic of this name being, I suppose, the closeness of the nation’s capitol, only an hour by car to the south). The first two do not stand out in my memory but for the films I saw at them, but the last is a palatial theater, 900 seats and a gigantic single screen, built in 1939, which played a variety of films, from current releases (I saw both Phantom Menace and Jurassic Park there) and older films (2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence of Arabia).

Having just watched Lawrence again, I appreciate suddenly how amazing it must have been to have seen it on that screen, in that theater, and although I was there, I was admittedly too young (11) for all I remember is the death, with none of the stark beauty.

And it is a beautiful film, and for the modern audience, a slow one. At nearly four hours long (I have the director’s cut, clocked at 228 minutes) it rivals, say, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in length, but instead of the three overlapping and diverging storylines there is only Lawrence. And in much of the first two hours, scenes which modern directors would simply sum up in a few seconds go on for minutes. This is, I think, a reflection of how trained we are as movie goers to read set-up shots, a language, perhaps, they were still then developing. It is an amazing feat, then, that it is not boring. The desert is beautiful, bleak, and a slow killer, so the pace seems even fitting. Certainly, as Lawrence acclimates himself to his harsh new surroundings, gets his army, as they come out of the grueling desert and take their first victory, the action picks up.

And the cast is wonderful, but that seems superfluous to say on a film that received so many academy awards. But Peter O’Toole’s performance carries the film with unshakable grace, as a confident man who loses his faith, as an ordinary man who finds himself considered extraordinary and believes it, and in doing so comes close to madness, and in being unable to give up that personality, goes even closer. But the heartbreak of the film are not found in the inner turmoil of Lawrence or in the war he is caught up in, but in how time after time his good intentions and grand plans are unraveled by the very people he is trying to save, sometimes from the Turks who rule their country now, and sometimes from his own masters, who intend to split the Turkish empire between them when this war is won.

And then, this is history. And the movie doesn’t sidestep around this issue either. Lawrence was doing what was expected of him (more than what was expected of him) but he was a dangerous figure, too, as a nearly messianic cult develops around him. And although he was in the pay of the British army he was not always acting in their interests (standing against those last dregs of imperialism), and perhaps he was not even acting always in the interests of his Arab comrades either. Was he mad? Was he self-serving? Did he imagine for himself a great destiny, and then ask men to do impossible things to get him to it?

But with his distant blue eyes, his distinct delivery (where he waits a full beat after a question, and answers (most often) with a clipped, curt, ‘yes’), that half smile he wears as if he’s the only one aware of the greater game being plays… it seems if he was crazy coming out of the desert, he was perhaps just as crazy going in. The only thing was that he didn’t know it yet. At the end of the movie, as his comrades leave him, Omar Sharif (as Sherif Ali) has a great set of lines, where he says that he both loves and fears Lawrence, and so great are these emotions in him, a friend, that he can’t help but know of the fear and hatred that Lawrence has for himself. And that’s the best summary there is for the man, in a beautifully complex movie which is set up as a memorial (opening, as it does, with his death and funeral) to a controversial man dead, by 1962, already over a quarter of a century.